Dylan Thomas

To-day, This Insect

To-day, This Insect - meaning Summary

Myth, Decay, and Transformation

The poem uses an insect figure to meditate on myth, decay, and renewal. The speaker frames symbolic collapse — a 'murder of Eden' — alongside metamorphosis, suggesting stories both destroy and reconstitute meaning. Classical and biblical names surface to link private loss with collective legend, and death appears as a recurring, ambiguous force that both ends and guarantees tales of love and madness. The tone is elegiac and visionary.

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To-day, this insect, and the world I breathe, Now that my symbols have outelbowed space, Time at the city spectacles, and half The dear, daft time I take to nudge the sentence, In trust and tale I have divided sense, Slapped down the guillotine, the blood-red double Of head and tail made witnesses to this Murder of Eden and green genesis. The insect certain is the plague of fables. This story's monster has a serpent caul, Blind in the coil scrams round the blazing outline, Measures his own length on the garden wall And breaks his shell in the last shocked beginning; A crocodile before the chrysalis, Before the fall from love the flying heartbone, Winged like a sabbath ass this children's piece Uncredited blows Jericho on Eden. The insect fable is the certain promise. Death: death of Hamlet and the nightmare madmen, An air-drawn windmill on a wooden horse, John's beast, Job's patience, and the fibs of vision, Greek in the Irish sea the ageless voice: 'Adam I love, my madmen's love is endless, No tell-tale lover has an end more certain, All legends' sweethearts on a tree of stories, My cross of tales behind the fabulous curtain.'

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